As revealed last week on The Star Wars Show, Marvel’s Doctor Aphra #2 finds the not-so-good archaeologist getting her accreditation revoked…by her own father! Sounds pretty crazy, but that’s par for the course with the good doctor. StarWars.com asked series artist Kev Walker to take us behind the scenes of the upcoming issue, and got some exclusive commentary on three pages — just the thing to hold us over until Doctor Aphra #1 hits stores December 7!
Kev Walker: Aphra isn’t a support character anymore; this is her own book and she’s on just about every page, so I have to put that extra effort into her acting. She’s in a situation that’s largely out of her control, and all that old familial angst has come back to haunt her. She can’t play it cool around her dad, because he knows how much of that is an act and he constantly undermines her.
Kev Walker: I’ve been trying to make the locations reminiscent of places that already exist in the Star Wars film universe — design echoes, really. Aphra’s ship, the Ark Angel has just been rebuilt, but from all the scrap that Aphra could scrounge together. So it really ought to have a similar feel to the Millennium Falcon, a piece of junk, but a really cool piece of junk. I did have Aphra senior sitting at a dejarik table at one point, but it was felt to be a step too close, so we took that out.”
Kev Walker: I didn’t want the characters to just be straight-forward inversions of other characters. Black Krrsantan can’t be just a dark, violent version of Chewbacca. He should be just as surprised by an irrational outburst from Aphra, as anyone else. When you have more of a book to fill with these characters, you need to see more than just the five-minute sequences when they are being cool. You have to see the rest of it — the humor, the surprises… Well, just being human, or as human as a Wookiee can be.
Look for Doctor Aphra #2 by Kieron Gillen and Kev Walker on December 21!
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